TIMEHEI: 



THE JOURNAL OF 



THE ROYAL AGRICULTURAL AND COMMERCIAL SOCIETY 

 OF BRITISH GUIANA. 



V°i- *• AUGUST, 1918. i.^^Vo^mk. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Loss and Gain. 



" Under the British flag wherever he journeyed, he found men of 

 English speech living in an atmosphere of liberty and carrying on the 

 dear domestic traditions of the British Isles. He saiv justice Urmly 

 planted there, industry and invention hard at ivork unfettered by 

 tyrants of any kind, domestic life prospering in natural conditions 

 and our old English kindness and cheerfulness and broad-minded 

 tolerance keeping things together. But he also saw room under that 

 same flag, amole room for millions and millions more of the human 

 race. The Empire wasn't a word to him, it was a vast and almost 

 boundless home for honest men." — (Sir Walter Raleigh in United Empire, 

 May, 1918.) 



So wrote a friend of Earl Grey after his lamented death last Septem- 

 ber. By that death this colony lost a sincere friend and we can only 

 trust that something of his broad and generous spirit, his lofty Imperial 

 patriotism and his generous acceptance of men of every creed, race and 

 colour as his fellow citizens in the fullest sense will continue to inspire 

 us in this outpost of the Empire. However restless we may be at the 

 slow pace of the colony's advance, at the continued restriction of our 

 colonial development (a restriction nowadays entailed mainly by war 

 conditions,) to a belt of cultivation reaching for the most part only five 

 or ten miles from tide-mark, we can at least realise with satisfaction that 

 every feature set forth in Earl Grey's view of the British Empire as a 

 whole is fully represented in this particular ptrt. Equality of opportunity 

 is the ideal of the Empire, an ideal which no Empire or Republic of 

 ancient or modern times has more consistently pursued, and no British 

 possession has more fully realized that ideal than British South America. 

 That the colony recognises the special advantage it en'oys in regard 

 to such equality of opportunity has been shown by the co-operation of 

 all its citizens in the past for the purposes of the war and by their insis- 



